Law Commons^™

Criminalization Tensions: Empirical Desert, Changing Norms, And Rape Reform, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

This short Article is part of the organizers’ larger Criminalization Project, which seeks, among other things, to develop theories for how criminalization decisions should be made. The argument presented here is that there is instrumentalist, as well as deontological, value in having criminalization decisions that generally track the community’s judgments about what is sufficiently condemnable to be criminal, but that there are also good reasons to deviate from community views. Interestingly, those in the business of social reform may be the ones with the greatest stake in normally tracking community views, in order to avoid community perceptions of the criminal …

Mercy, Crime Control, And Moral Credibility, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

If, in the criminal justice context, "mercy" is defined as forgoing punishment that is deserved, then much of what passes for mercy is not. Giving only minor punishment to a first-time youthful offender, for example, might be seen as an exercise of mercy but in fact may be simply the application of standard blameworthiness principles, under which the offender's lack of maturity may dramatically reduce his blameworthiness for even a serious offense. Desert is a nuanced and rich concept that takes account of a wide variety of factors. The more a writer misperceives desert as wooden and objective, the more …

Beyond Experience: Getting Retributive Justice Right, Dan Markel, Chad Flanders, David C. Gray

All Faculty Scholarship

How central should hedonic adaptation be to the establishment of sentencing policy?

In earlier work, Professors Bronsteen, Buccafusco, and Masur (BBM) drew some normative significance from the psychological studies of adaptability for punishment policy. In particular, they argued that retributivists and utilitarians alike are obliged on pain of inconsistency to take account of the fact that most prisoners, most of the time, adapt to imprisonment in fairly short order, and therefore suffer much less than most of us would expect. They also argued that ex-prisoners don't adapt well upon re-entry to society and that social planners should consider their post-release …

Risk Taking And Force Protection, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper addresses two questions about the morality of warfare: (1) how much risk must soldiers take to minimize unintended civilian casualties caused by their own actions (“collateral damage”), and (2) whether it is the same for the enemy's civilians as for one's own.

The questions take on special importance in warfare where one side is able to attack the other side from a safe distance, but at the cost of civilian lives, while safeguarding civilians may require soldiers to take precautions that expose them to greater risk. In a well-known article, Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin argue that while …

Criminal Law: Egypt, Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter presents the substantive criminal law of Egypt according to the sources of that law: the 1971 Constitution, the 1937 Penal Code, and other legislation; decisions by the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC), the Court of Cassation, and other organs of the Egyptian judiciary; and administrative and executive regulations. The evolution of modern Egyptian criminal law is explained, and contemporary scholarly commentary is referenced; also addressed are the constitutional amendments of 2007, and controversial aspects of the law and its enforcement such as the use of emergency and military courts and the prosecution of alleged homosexuals. The chapter thus serves …

It's Good To Be Autonomous: Prospective Consent, Retrospective Consent, And The Foundation Of Consent In The Criminal Law, Jonathan Witmer-Rich

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

What is the foundation of consent in the criminal law? Classically liberal commentators have offered at least three distinct theories. J.S. Mill contends we value consent because individuals are the best judges of their own interests. Joel Feinberg argues an individual’s consent matters because she has a right to autonomy based on her intrinsic sovereignty over her own life. Joseph Raz also focuses on autonomy, but argues that society values autonomy as a constituent element of individual well-being, which it is the state’s duty to promote.The criminal law’s approach to the problem of non-contemporaneous consent—prospective consent and retrospective consent—casts a …

The Federal Common Law Crime Of Corruption, Lisa Kern Griffin

Faculty Scholarship

This contribution to the North Carolina Law Review’s 2010 symposium, Adaptation and Resiliency in Legal Systems, considers the compatibility between the common law nature of honest services fraud and the dynamic quality of public integrity offenses. Corruption enforcement became a focal point of recent debates about over- criminalization because it typifies expansive legislative mandates for prosecutors and implicit delegations to courts. Federal prosecutions of political corruption have relied primarily on an open-textured provision: 18 U.S.C. § 1346, the honest services extension of the mail fraud statute. Section 1346 raises notice concerns because it contains few self-limiting terms, but it has …

Advantaging Aggressors: Justice & Deterrence In International Law, Paul H. Robinson, Adil Ahmad Haque

All Faculty Scholarship

Current international law imposes limitations on the use of force to defend against unlawful aggression that improperly advantage unlawful aggressors and disadvantage their victims. The Article gives examples of such rules, governing a variety of situations, showing how clearly unjust they can be. No domestic criminal law system would tolerate their use.

There are good practical reasons why international law should care that its rules are perceived as unjust. Given the lack of an effective international law enforcement mechanism, compliance depends to a large degree upon the moral authority with which international law speaks. Compliance is less likely when its …

Mental Torture: A Critique Of Erasures In U.S. Law, David Luban, Henry Shue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Both international and federal law criminalize mental torture as well as physical torture, and both agree that “severe mental pain or suffering” defines mental torture. However, U.S. law provides a confused and convoluted definition of severe mental pain or suffering—one that falsifies the very concept and makes mental torture nearly impossible to prosecute or repress. Our principal aim is to expose the fallacies that underlie the U.S. definition of mental torture: first, a materialist bias that the physical is more real than the mental; second, a substitution trick that defines mental pain or suffering through a narrow set of causes …

Improving Criminal Justice: How Can We Make The American Criminal Justice System More Just?, Joseph L. Hoffmann, Nancy J. King

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

"Sticky Metaphors" And The Persistence Of The Traditional Voluntary Manslaughter Doctrine, Joseph L. Hoffmann, Elise J. Percy, Steven J. Sherman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Supreme Court Criminal Law Jurisprudence: Fair Trials, Cruel Punishment, And Ethical Lawyering—October 2009 Term, Richard Klein

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Alternative Elements, Jessica A. Roth

Articles

The U.S. Constitution provides a criminal defendant with a right to trial by jury, and most states and the federal government require criminal juries to agree unanimously before a defendant may be convicted. But what exactly must a jury agree upon unanimously? Well-established doctrine, pursuant to In re Winship, provides that the jury must agree that the prosecution has proven every element of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet what the elements of any given offense are is not as clear as one might expect. Frequently, criminal statutes—especially federal statutes—describe an array of prohibited conduct, leaving ambiguous whether …

Minority Practice, Majority's Burden: The Death Penalty Today, James S. Liebman, Peter Clarke

Faculty Scholarship

Although supported in principle by two-thirds of the public and even more of the States, capital punishment in the United States is a minority practice when the actual death-sentencing practices of the nation's 3000-plus counties and their populations are considered This feature of American capital punishment has been present for decades, has become more pronounced recently, and is especially clear when death sentences, which are merely infrequent, are distinguished from executions, which are exceedingly rare.

The first question this Article asks is what forces account for the death-proneness of a minority of American communities? The answer to that question – …